Cheryl and Richard Hazeltine love their family, but this year they plan to spend Christmas with friends instead.

Mollie Bracigliano and Michael Ross catch up at a holiday party. The two have been friends for more than 25 years.

By Todd Plitt

The Hazeltines, both 63, discovered how important friends could be 35 years ago when they moved from New Jersey to Austin, where Richard joined the physics faculty at the University of Texas.

"I lived far away from my parents and aunts and uncles and sisters and was being dropped into a foreign land," recalls Cheryl, who teaches informal classes on gardening. "My friends have become very strong for my support locally."

In many ways, friends are the new family. They're there to commiserate with you, celebrate with you and provide the kind of everyday emotional support that humans crave. When family is distant — whether physically or emotionally — friends fill the vacuum, especially at the holidays.

"It was, 'Are we spending enough time with the family? Can we visit our friends now? Is everybody getting in their equal time?' "

This year, they spent Thanksgiving at the beach with two other couples — an annual tradition started 10 years ago — and will spend Christmas with one of those couples at a lodge at Big Bend National Park in western Texas. They'll visit their son and his family in Iowa in February.

"Most years we do Christmas with the family, but every now and then we take a different course," Cheryl says.

A range of demographic factors has increased the importance of friends in our lives. According to the Census Bureau, moving has become common, with almost 20% of moves being to another state. Americans marry later and have children later than they did a generation ago; those Waltons-esque images of large, close, multigenerational families are increasingly rare. About one in two marriages end in divorce. More than 25% of households today are composed of singles — the most common household type.

SEXES TREAT FRIENDSHIPS DIFFERENTLY

The Mars/Venus differences between men and women couldn't be more apparent than in same-sex friendships.

Research shows men's friendships are based on doing things, such as playing a team sport. Women's are based on talking and sharing feelings.

In the past, men were more expressive, says Peter Nardi, a sociology professor at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., who edited the 1992 book Men's Friendships. But the appearance of Freud and discussion of homosexuality in the late 19th century caused men to distance themselves publicly from other men.

Then in the 1960s and 1970s, the women's movement and the gay rights movement started altering perceptions of gender roles.

"You have the emerging Alan Alda/Phil Donahue-type male," he says. "We start seeing an allowance for men to be a little more expressive and emotional, and talk more about issues and feelings."

Such examples include Bill Clinton hugging Al Gore in 1992 or George W. Bush, who Nardi says "allows himself to get involved emotionally."

Women's friendships are complex, says Ruthellen Josselson, co-author of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls' and Women's Friendships.

"The nature of the friendship is pretty wired in the joys and difficulties involved," she says. "They have the positive, sustaining, meaningful, joyful aspects, and they also have their dissension, competitiveness and envy and hostility. Because friendships are so highly valued and important, and there is so much at stake, the pain that goes with it also is very great."

Nardi believes the continued evolution of men's and women's roles in society also will affect their friendships. "My hunch would be that men's and women's friendships will converge more," he says.

By Sharon Jayson

Friends are stepping in where only family once trod, serving in roles as important as godparents to new babies or as basic as standby transportation for schoolchildren in need of a ride. And research conducted in Australia suggests that good friends, rather than close family ties, may help you live longer in old age.

When there are no living relatives or there's an estrangement from family, friends can play an even more central role. Among some gay people, for example, close friends provide an alternative familial community, especially when relatives don't accept a family member's homosexuality.

"My friends are definitely a surrogate family," says Jasmyne Cannick, 28, a legislative adviser from Los Angeles who is a lesbian.

"Even if your family is accepting of your sexual orientation, there is a limit," she says. "Your families want you to come home, but they might not necessarily want you to bring your partner."

Rather than Christmas, Cannick says she celebrates Kwanzaa, an African-American cultural festival, with her friends.

"My friends are very traditional, even though they are gay," she says. "Holidays are a big deal. It's a very lavish spread."

John Perry of San Francisco says he relied more on friends than family until he and his partner of nine years adopted a son and created what he terms a "conventional unconventional family."

Unlike some gay men who have strained family relations, Perry, 41, who is in marketing communications, says they would be with his extended family for the holidays if they lived in the same city.

An 'undermined' institution

But some traditionalists look askance at today's broader view of what constitutes family.

"The institution of the family has been weakened and undermined steadily over the past 40 years," says Christian psychologist James Dobson, author of 36 books and founder of the non-profit Focus on the Family, whose mission is to "preserve traditional values and the institution of the family."

"The homosexual-activist movement has achieved striking success in changing the way families are perceived in the culture," he says in an e-mail interview. "Friends are priceless to us, but they can never replace families."

"The family has been pretty resilient when you think of how many people are divorced, and we still have family ties," says Rebecca Adams, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and editor of the journal Personal Relationships. "Maybe it was never quite the way people thought it was."

But Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington, does see evidence that family ties are not what they used to be.

"I do think family — as being the center of one's universe — has weakened," she says. "It's hard to find three generations of the same family in the same town anymore. You have more in common with people who are approximal to you — friends, neighbors, colleagues. They know you in ways your family ceases to know you."

Michael Niederhausen, 29, is close with his three younger brothers and every year visits family in Atlanta for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, but it was his friends in McLean, Va., who helped him over a recent romantic breakup.

"These are people I hang out with," he says. "And it makes it easier to talk with them. I tell my brothers things, but it's a different kind of connection."

Whether friends play a larger role in our lives than in the past is unclear because sociologists have little empirical data, Adams says.

"We don't know if they have become more important because we don't know if they've been important before," she says. "The concern about families becoming less important was expressed more in the '50s when residential mobility increased a great deal."

Since that time, "we went through the scholarly literature and decided that the death of the family had been exaggerated."

New research conducted in the United Kingdom supports what many U.S. experts on friendship say: It's not an either/or situation. Families aren't endangered by friendship. Friends and family complement rather than compete.

"Friends can be family, and family can be friends," says British sociologist Ray Pahl of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex.

Pahl's decade-long analysis of the annual British Household Panel Study, based on 10,000 respondents, was published in September in the British Journal of Sociology. He examined questions about respondents' relationships with their three best friends.

"What we've shown is this process of suffusion — family becomes more friend-like and friends become more family-like," says Pahl, co-author of a book titled Rethinking Friendship, due next summer.

Pahl says the evidence is clear that these findings, though collected in Britain, apply to other cultures, including the USA.

"It's extremely important in the modern world that people who are moving about and changing their jobs and changing their homes have the capacity to make new friends," Pahl says. "People who don't make friends easily or are too much tied in a traditional way to the family are disadvantaged."

After a divorce, for example, friends are often more important than family. "They are less likely to be judgmental about whose fault it was," he says. And, in times of illness, friends provide "less emotionally charged support."

"Very often people don't want to worry family if they're ill," he says. "They say, 'My mother worries so much, it makes me more ill.' "

Jan Yager, a Stamford, Conn., sociologist and author, says friendships may be viewed as a more important relationship when family ties are less pronounced.

"There is this rather Pollyanna-ish view of friendship," she says. "Since we choose friends, they are wonderful people in our lives. And since you don't choose your relatives, they may not be someone you want to hang out with."

Friendly health benefits

As new family-like groups are being created from cadres of friends, the benefits are clear both physically and emotionally.

Research has long shown that people with well-developed friendship networks live longer than people who don't. Several studies have shown that people who have at least one close friend have greater resistance to illness and speedier recoveries and lower incidences of mental illness.

For older adults, friendship is actually more important to psychological well-being than family relationships.

Research published this year in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health suggests that a network of friends is more beneficial to your health than family support, at least among the very old. Data from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Aging, which from 1992 through 2002 monitored the health and well-being of almost 1,500 people 70 and older, suggest that close contact with children and relatives had little impact on survival rates, but those with the strongest network of friends lived longer.

Stephanie Tucker, 23, of Seattle, will spend this Christmas with friends rather than going home to her family in New Philadelphia, Ohio, about 30 minutes from Akron. She works for a proprietary school and is a graduate student. She says her friends, all young professionals, are in the same position. They had to choose a holiday vacation either at Thanksgiving or Christmas and went home for a long Thanksgiving break.

But with Christmas looming, Tucker says the reality of her first holiday away from home is beginning to hit.

"I'm a little bit disappointed," she says. "I'd love to see my parents over Christmas. I knew moving out here that the distance was going to be an issue. We'll spend a lot of time with phone calls and e-mails over the holiday. I'll maybe be a little regretful as it gets closer."